Many products, such as food related products, beauty and fashion items, home, hardware and repair supplies, automobile related products, electronic products, such as televisions, radios, cell phones, personal computers (PCs), games and packaged PC software, and the like, after manufacturing, are generally moved to a distribution center or warehouse. A distribution center controls the flow of the various products from receiving to storage to shipping. For example, products are received and moved to storage locations termed slots, selected products are then moved from their slots to placement in shipping containers to be sent to marketing endpoints, such as grocery stores, department stores, and the like. It can be appreciated that a haphazard method of storing products in a warehouse can lead to high costs due to inefficiencies in locating and moving the products. Further complicating the flow of products in a warehouse, is the varying demand for each product, such as experienced from an initial product introduction, through promotional and seasonal demands, to phase-out. A product's distribution cost is overhead that reduces profits and increases the price consumers must pay.
A physical warehouse is generally built with shelf racks in various configurations with each shelf containing labeled locations, called slots, for item storage. Slots in a warehouse may also be identified by marking locations on a floor, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, barcodes, or otherwise. Operations performed in a warehouse include, for example, assigning items to slots, storing items from a receiving dock into assigned slots, and retrieving items from assigned slots to a transport dock. Warehouse slotting systems generally exist to guide users as to where to place items in a warehouse. Prior systems base this guidance on matching an item to a storage location slot with respect to dimensional data, weight capacity data, general location in the warehouse, such as designated areas for high, medium, and low volume items, or the like. The common feature in these prior systems is the item to slot matching is generally done by considering the single item and candidate slot. Also, prior systems generally captured data related to product movement within a warehouse, but did not typically provide means for improving product flow beyond a mere visualization of current operations.